Before you install an cameras in your home, ask yourself this one question: "How do you want to consume the content that they produce?"
This is really important because this will decide which cameras to use and which associated features and services are best for you. It is quite likely that you will require a range of cameras, each optimised for its location and installation environment.
Many people simply want their cameras to be 'fit and forget'. Most of the time, you won't want to know about the cameras and the media that they have captured. When the time comes though, you need to be confident that the media any potential evidence has been captured and can be easily retrieved.
Many people make the assumption that you need to capture video but it really depends upon your the application or use case. Our research shows that in many cases a series of still images is actually more useful. The trick is to ensure that the contextual smart home has the information required to know when best to capture images or video.
The industry default approach is one of 'brute force' and involves 24 × 7 video recording. This 'capture everything' approach can work well but it requires a lot of storage and good networks. This approach does make sense in some environments. The down sides are huge volumes of data and lack of privacy for you and your family.
There are also environments where a more 'intelligent' can be used and the contextual smart home has the sensors, information and context to make IP cameras work smarter and more efficiently. Using external sensors covering the field of view can result in better privacy and more usable content, without compromising security. It can also allow the captured content to be 'tagged', so that it can more easily be searched and reviewed if required.
A simple example of this is using motion detection for pathways, corridors and other spaces. Doors, gates and beam break sensors can be used to 'encircle' the space in view and ensure that the camera is active only when the space is occupied.
A more complex approach is to identify when certain people are at home and to change the way the security cameras operate dynamically. This is a much more advanced approach based on whole home context and can include advanced concepts such as our real-time threat detection.
In the smart home context is really important to both a great user experience and in ensuring that devices like cameras work to the best of their capabilities. The contextual smart home enables 'dumb' cameras to change their behaviour and adapt the way their work to their local environment and the context of the home as a whole.
Other elements of our contextual smart home will work in support of the cameras. It will switch on both normal external lighting and also IR light sources installed for security purposes, based on other sensor input and the perceived threat level.
Our cameras will also work differently depending on the threat level.
A key element of any security system is in being able to quickly and easily access the captured media. A key part of this is storing it in a structured manner, e.g. in folders based on zone, year, month, day, etc. and the media being labelled or named in a obvious and useful manner. Automatic tagging of content using metatags is incredibly useful, so long as your search tools support this capability.
Being able to search the media in ways other than by date can also be very useful capability, e.g. search for faces present.
Are you happy for your camera footage to be recorded to the cloud? Are you aware of the storage limitations or are you prepared to pay a monthly subscription fee for cloud storage and features?
Recording to the cloud will use a lot of bandwidth, especially with higher resolution cameras. They will also fail to work if your Internet connection is down and from a security system perspective this a major weakness. They will also fail to work if the cloud service is down.
For reliability, security and privacy reasons we do not use any cameras that use cloud storage. Our smart home does synchronise some media to (our chosen) cloud storage service (when it is available), to enable our whole family to gain access to it though.
Picture quality is not simply about resolution, though this is an important factor in capturing enough useful detail. Good quality cameras have quality optics, offering clearer pictures. They can also handle high contrast environments and respond quickly to changes in lighting conditions. If you want to capture number/licence plates on cars for example, then you are going to need a very good camera that is capable of doing this in a wide range of lighting conditions. If you then also want to do automatic plate recognition, then this places even greater demands on the quality of the camera.
Higher resolution provides a sharper and clearer picture but at the cost of higher bandwidth and greater storage requirements. Entry level security cameras typically work at a resolution of 640 × 480 pixels. Many of the cheaper cameras only support 1280 × 720 pixels. Many cameras support 1920 × 1080 pixels (full-HD) and this is the lowest resolution we would ever use in our smart home. There are also 4K (3840 × 2160 pixels) IP cameras on the market now at reasonable prices.
Simply capturing and storing 4K video 24 × 7 is going to require a huge amount of storage and processing power though. 4K cameras are going will be much more valuable when under intelligent smart home control, with the smart home deciding when best to make use of the extra resolution available.
When capturing video it is important to decide if you also want to capture audio. Not all cameras support audio capture and transmission as part of the video feed. A suitable mechanism for viewing and listening to the audio is also required. This can be useful for external cameras and some also support external microphones to capture audio from a better location, e.g. microphone at ground level for a camera mounted up at roof level.
You need to be sure your camera and network connectivity can support video capture at the required frame rate.
Some people like to view cameras in real time and the installation may then require pan, zoon and tilt (PZT) capability. This is sometimes required if your camera is covering a large area and is being monitored by a person. It allows them to look at specific areas or objects in more detail and track them across the field of view. This is less useful for unmonitored cameras but can be useful during installation and setup.
The form factor of the camera is very important. You may want something very small or virtually invisible when installed. You may want something highly visible, to act a clear deterrent. You may want something that is the right colour or just simply aesthetically pleasing to the eye. The installation may also need the camera to be physically secure or vandal proof.
Brand may also be important to you. You want to buy a camera that you can be confident in, something secure and reliable. They are many cheap Chinese cameras on the market that are well known for their security vulnerabilities and poor construction quality.
Our view is that wired networks are more reliable, more secure and provide higher bandwidth. We avoid wireless networks wherever possible. That said, sometimes it is not physically possible to run cables to all locations and a wireless network might be the only solution. Bear in mind that Wi-Fi is a weak point in any security system as it is subject to interference and is more easily compromised.
All of our cameras are connected to a Gigabit switch that has a protected power supply (via our Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS), so they all continue working in the event of a power failure.
The power required is often an important installation factor and a suitable power supply or feed may not be close to the installation point. Consideration should also be given as to whether a protected power supply is required, in case of mains power failure. Do you really want this key security feature to fail if the power is cut to your home.
The ability to support Power over Ethernet (PoE) is now fairly common. This simplifies the installation and wiring by powering the camera over the Ethernet network cable. This requires a switch or router that supports this capability though.
If the camera is to be used outside, it is important that the camera is designed to withstand all weathers. Outdoor IP cameras have moisture resistant cases and seals for the required cables. When installing cameras outside, it is important that they don't face directly at sun, as this will damage the sensor.
Due to the privacy issues associated with IP cameras, we don't typically install any inside our home. The only exception to this is when we go on holiday and then we may install them temporarily in key areas. These will typically be activated by motion detection to other sensors when the house mode is set to 'Away'.
Some cameras support the capability to work at night. Cheaper ones often have IR LED lighting that provides them with the ability to light up the area in front of the camera at night but, these have limited range and this is not a true night time capability. This is usually combined with a switchable IR cut-off filter and they usually switch from colour to black & white in this mode.
If you want you cameras to work well at night, then having your smart home control external lighting that can help light up the space being covered makes a lot of sense. It is also advisable to install dedicated IR lighting to ensure your cameras capture the best quality media. IR lighting under intelligent control is also less annoying to neighbours than visible lighting but, visible lighting is a good deterrent and improves security.
Most cameras have a fixed viewing angle and field of view. Some support optical or digital zoom though. Some cameras are also available with different lenses, for different installation environments. It is important that you choose one that covers the required area for a given installation location.
It is also possible to buy cameras providing a 360° view.
A lot of security cameras on the market have vulnerabilities but the biggest of these occurs when users don't change the default security settings:
It's really important to understand how you want to trigger your cameras to capture images and video. Obviously, this is not an issue if your cameras are doing 24 × 7 recording though. There are usually various trigger options but some cheaper cameras may only a subset of these:
In our experience, motion detection is prone to false events. This can be from birds flying past, insects, trees blowing in the wind, clouds overhead, washing blowing on the washing line, a light being switched on, etc. It is much better to use an external trigger such as a PIR sensor, beam break sensor or door contact sensor but this assumes the camera has a suitable interface to then take action. In practice our cameras are triggered by many sensors and with full whole home context.
Equally important as the triggers is the action taken when one of the triggers occurs. Most IP cameras can be configured to perform specific actions on triggering. Typically this may be to FTP or email an image or video to a specific server/service. This can be useful if all you want to do is to capture the footage. One advantage of this technique is that the camera can often capture a few seconds before the trigger occurred.
Our @smartest_home is much smarter than this though. Because it has whole home context, it 'sees' all the triggers and can intelligently determine what action to take. Typically this involves making an authenticated request for an image or video clip, which is then stored locally, using our preferred file structure and naming convention. Our smart home will then see these new files being stored and can process them.
We are currently undertaking research on face detection and face recognition. We are using open source software with still images captured by any of the cameras in and around our smart home.
We are also extending this research to enable object detection across all of our cameras. We have particular use cases in mind that we are focussed on:
Fixed cameras are prone to false triggering by birds, insects and spiders. Spider webs in particular can be an issue. Cameras with PZT functionality can be moved to break spiders webs (unless they are enclosed in a dome).
Archiving of 'old' media ensures it is kept for usage later if required and also ensures that there is enough storage space for new media being captured. Typically, we archive off old footage at the end of each year.
There are various ways to access netcams from a web browser, to Smartphone apps. Our preferred method (which works both at home and away from home) is a Smartphone app. These apps require you to set up routes through your firewall, if you want to access them remotely and the feeds should be authenticated. Some cameras also allow you to encrypt the video feed.
Our contextual smart home can decide to run a 'perimeter check' scene when it thinks it is necessary (or it can be run manually). This will activate external lighting and it will then start to capture media from all the relevant cameras.
